Over 59,000 personal data breaches reported across Europe since introduction of GDPR

Over 59,000 data breach notifications have been reported across the European Economic Area by public and private organizations since the GDPR came into force on 25th May 2018, according to DLA Piper's GDPR Data Breach survey.

The Netherlands, Germany and the UK topped the table in the report with approximately 15,400, 12,600, and 10,600 reported breaches respectively.

The lowest numbers of reported breaches were made in Liechtenstein, Iceland and Cyprus with 15, 25 and 35 reported breaches respectively.

The Netherlands, with 89.8 reported breaches per 100,000 people topped the list when the number of notifications were weighted against country populations, followed by Ireland and Denmark. Of the 26 EEA countries where breach notification data is available, the UK, Germany and France ranked tenth, eleventh and twenty-first respectively on a reported fine per capita basis. Greece, Italy and Romania reported the fewest number of breaches per capita.

To date 91 fines have been reported. Not all of these relate to personal data breach and several relate to other infringements of GDPR. The highest GDPR fine imposed to date is €50 million, which was made against Google on 21 January 2019. This was a French decision in relation to the processing of personal data for advertising purposes without valid authorisation, rather than a personal data breach.

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